Paying Attention
Listen: “Morning Has Broken” by Yusuf/Cat Stevens/Rick Wakeman
Paying attention is a cultivated habit which nurtures connection, healing and survival. It’s a spiritual practice which provides moments of beauty, serenity, and immersion. I can find myself captured with gratitude and delight for the life I have received, even when deep pain and disappointment are swirling in my body.
Recently, I am walking and hiking most days instead of riding my bike due to my rotator cuff surgery on April 14, 2022. Though I prefer to ride my bike for exercise, community, and mental health, walking through nature is a close second. It also has benefits that I don’t receive while cycling. When I am mountain biking or gravel riding, I cover distances of ten to thirty miles or more, and I experience the wind on my skin, the smell of fields, trees, and the occasional dead animals or skunks; I experience the extreme heat or cold and the woods, the dirt, the creeks, the lakes, the gravel dust, the landscapes, the dogs, the squirrels, the flocks of birds, and the occasional snake—all at relatively high speeds.
When I am walking, everything slows down and I only cover five miles or so in the same amount of time I would normally spend cycling. The slow speed of walking allows me to pay attention to more detail in nature. The only insects I notice while I am cycling are the ones that hit me in the face or manage to enter my open mouth and hit me in the back of my throat. (How do they do that?) I always try to cough them out, but I usually end up swallowing them.
When I am walking, I might stop and watch some industrious ants at work or a scampering lizard scoot across the rocks. I pay attention to soil, rocks, insects, wild flowers, fungi, animals, trees, plants, sunlight, color spectrums, snowflakes, icicles, moisture, textures, fragrances, breeze, and temperature. It allows me to feel more immersed in and connected to planet earth. I can pause, observe, reflect, and appreciate the gift of life on this third rock from the sun.
The other day I was walking in nature and I happened to spot a barred owl perched on a hackberry tree limb. I stopped and stared at it for a while, and then I noticed its partner perched about two trees away on a black locust tree limb. As I was watching and trying to get a picture with my phone—I saw them—in the hollow of a dead oak tree, I saw the heads of at least three small owlets. I was mesmerized with this family of barred owls. I rarely spot owls in the daylight hours, so this was exceptional. As I gazed, time paused; my racing thoughts slowed down to the point where they simply extinguished for the moment. I was connected and everything felt beautiful.
In her book, The Artists Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, Julia Cameron writes about the importance of paying attention. She says, “The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention” (p. 53). And paying attention can provide healing and delight even in times of great pain. She tells the following story:
In a year when a long and rewarding love affair was lurching gracelessly away for the center of her life, the writer May Sarton kept A Journal of a Solitude. In it, she records coming home from a particularly painful weekend with her lover. Entering her empty house, “I was stopped by the threshold of my study by a ray on a Korean chrysanthemum, lighting it up like a spotlight, deep red petals and Chinese yellow center….Seeing it was like getting a transfusion of autumn light.”
It’s no accident that May Sarton uses the word transfusion. The loss of her lover was a wound, and in her responses to the chrysanthemum, in the act of paying attention, Sarton’s healing began (p. 53).
This spiritual practice of paying attention is, for me, a form of meditation. One aspect of the practice of meditation is about paying attention in the now, in the moment. It’s something we can cherish. This moment. Right now. I tend to furiously focus on my past or my future. It can be exhausting. Paying attention to my body, my breath, my emotions, my thoughts, and my surroundings—attending to the moment with curiosity and openness, not judgment—it helps connect me to myself and my surroundings. Often it’s when I pay attention in nature that I find some of my deepest moments of connection. I try to find time each day to move my body outdoors, in nature. I find it immensely nourishing for my soul and healing for all types of pain.
Julian Cameron continues her reflection on paying attention and the experience of pain:
It may be different for others, but pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention. In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right. Yesterday the marriage may have ended. Tomorrow the cat may die. The phone call from the lover, for all my waiting, may not ever come, but just at the moment, just now, that’s all right. I am breathing in and out. Realizing this, I began to notice that each moment was not without its beauty (p. 54).
Shalom
©realfredherron, 2022
